Through emotionally charged portraits and richly layered interior views, Paul D'Amato's photographs made on Chicago's West Side provide a nuanced perspective on life in some of the most challenging and troubled neighborhoods in the U.S. Equally committed to his craft and to immersing himself in the community, D'Amato's collaborative approach to portraiture aspires to narrow the divide between his and his sitters' subjective experiences in order to create photographs that are at once genuine and aesthetically engaging. We Shall: Photographs by Paul D'Amato brings together ten years of work and offers insight into the making of the photographs. By pairing variants of a portrait from a single sitting, D'Amato seeks to complicate the images' meaning by defying the authority of a single photograph as a comprehensive statement. Neither feel-good narratives nor stories of despair, D'Amato's photographs convey the complexities of representation and the ambiguities of life in a socially and economically marginalized community. Published by the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago. Includes essays by Gregory J. Harris (Assistant Curator, DePaul Art Museum) and Pastor Cleophus J. Lee (Original Providence Baptist Church, Chicago).    Hardcover, 10 x 8 in., 102-pages, 47 plates, 3 gatefolds. We Shall: Photographs by Paul D'Amato  has been funded by the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. “Just as the truth is spoken in jest, the way we sit for the camera both reveals and conceals. It’s indicative of how we really appear and how we wish to appear. And when you add to that what we as viewers bring to the photo―seeing it through our own lenses of what we know or think we know about that person and the factors that shape that life―looking at a portrait becomes a complex interaction. This truth seems inescapable when encountering ‘We Shall’. . . . Nearly a decade ago, D’Amato took his camera to the Chicago’s West Side, where he began photographing residents and the place they call home. For him, every encounter is a two-way street. . . . While D’Amato’s motive is more artistic than documentary, a creative act rather than social activism, he allows that these images can be more than pretty pictures.” -- Thomas Connors, on the exhibition ― Splash, Chicago Sun-Times “Before he was President of the United States, the Illinois senator Barack Obama selected a suite of photographs by Paul D’Amato to hang in his congressional office. The images depicted scenes from the lives of regular people―a child, an old pastor―in Chicago, Obama’s hometown. . . . D’Amato pulls arresting shots from the difficult existence of a street prostitute or a single parent living in a slum, but most of his images build upon a narrative of uplifting personal and spiritual transformation, expressed by the exhibition’s title, ‘We Shall,’ which refers to a classic Civil Rights anthem but also to Paul the Apostle’s writings on the Resurrection. The images of churchgoers in their Sunday clothes, of baptism allegories in public pools, and of divine light shining into sitters’ eyes, heighten the motif of religious salvation.” ― Photograph, on the exhibition "This book of photos is excellent. No two ways about it." -- Jonathan Blaustein ― aPhotoEditor Paul D'Amato holds an MFA in photography from Yale (1985). He received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1994 and 2004, and his work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago. Gregory J. Harris is the Assistant Curator at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago. He is a specialist in the history of photography and curated the exhibitions Of National Interest (2008) and In the  Vernacular (2010) at the Art Institute of Chicago and Malick Sidibé: Portraits from Mali  (2012) at the DePaul Art Museum. Cleophus J. Lee has served as the Pastor of the Original Providence Baptist Church in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago since 2009. He is completing graduate studies at Liberty University Theological Seminary.